The Land of Dragons (Geoff Ryan)

A Parable of Incarnational Urban Ministry (meant to be read aloud).

They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations. (Isaiah 61:4)

O

nce upon a time there was a land people thought was full of dragons. Now, it was mostly people who didn’t live in the land, people from the outside, who told the tales about all the dragons that roamed there. They whispered stories they had heard second and third hand about what the dragons looked like and listened to rumours of how awful they acted, how they breathed fire and ate people and generally trashed everything in sight. They would use these stories of the dragons to scare their children into behaving better, and then they themselves would snuggle down in their warm beds at night, safely far away in another land, and feel deliciously afraid at the thought of the dragons and deeply grateful that they themselves didn’t live in this land.

If any of them came near this land on their travels, they would always find a path that would take them around the borders of the land, for they would never, ever enter in it in case they were pounced on and eaten by a dragon. Otherwise they felt safe enough, for it was a well known ‘fact’ that the dragons never strayed outside the borders of their land.

From time to time the newspapers in those far off lands would report an incidence involving a dragon. If there were too many of these incidences in too short a time, the rulers of the surrounding lands started muttering darkly among themselves about the “dragon problem” and what to do about it and mostly how to ensure that it didn’t spill out and over into the surrounding lands and into the safe lives of their own people. They hired more and more dragon-catchers in an effort to make the land dragon free, but all these dragon-catchers ever caught were little lizards that looked something like dragons, but which everybody knew were not the real thing at all.

Then one day a few people decided that they would move into the land where the dragons lived and live there themselves. Sure they had heard the stories of the dragons but they had also met some of the people who lived in that land and they seemed nice enough so they thought it couldn’t be all that bad. Their friends mostly thought they were crazy while others that they were very brave (though a little foolish). Most agreed that they would surely die or at the very least come to some dreadful harm. But having decided that this is what they should do…they went ahead and did it. In twos and threes the people in this group slipped over the border and settled into the land of the dragons.

And they were in for two of the biggest surprises of their lives.

You see, while they didn’t really go looking for dragons, they did at least arrive expecting to see or encounter dragons. They were prepared to have to run away from a few, if needed. But they didn’t find any dragons in the land. Not one single, solitary dragon. They saw a few lizards and occasionally, a large slouching shadow shifting off to the side and glimpsed out of the corner of their eye… a thing that maybe could be something like a dragon, but they couldn’t be really sure. And little by little as time passed and the newcomers settled down to live their lives in the new land, they stopped worrying about dragons and sometimes even went days without thinking about them at all.

Their second real surprise was the people they met in the new land. They weren’t anything at all like what they expected, though truth be told if they thought about it, they would’ve realized that they hadn’t given much thought to the people in the land at all, busy as they had been thinking mostly about the dragons. The people in the land were…well…nice and friendly and pretty ordinary. In fact, they seemed just like the people in the land they had moved from. Which is to say - they were just like them!

But what about the dragons? What about what the other people in other lands had said about the dragons? How could the truth be so different from what they had thought all along? So, they asked their neighbours what the truth was.

And different people gave different answers.

Some said indeed the dragons did exist. You just had to stay out late into the night and you could catch a glimpse of them because they only came out then. Of course, the people who gave them this answer never went out at night and themselves hadn’t seen any of these dragons, but they knew this to be the truth, nevertheless.

Others answered that there used to be dragons, but not anymore. They had all gone away, moved far, far away and never came round anymore. The dragon-catchers had chased them all away and so things were much quieter now. Dragons were a thing of the past.

Still others didn’t give any answer at all. They just smiled knowingly, looked from side to side, smiled again and then walked away without saying a word.

Naturally it was this latter group that intrigued the newcomers the most. Their non-answer to the mystery of the dragons seemed to hold more truth than all the other answers put together. What they knew, they knew, and not just because someone else had told them it was so.

After a while of living in the new land, about the time it was no longer “new” or even “another land” anymore but had started to become “home”. When the newcomers were no longer “new” and had changed from “comers” to “stayers”. When they were considered by the people of the land to have always sort of lived there and been a part of life, around this time they become close friends and valued neighbours with everyone who had lived there their whole lives.

And when you ask a question of a friend, it is quite a different thing than asking a question of a stranger and especially of someone you’ve just met. So they asked their neighbor-friends: “What about the dragons?”

And their neighbours again smiled knowingly, looked from side to side and then instead of walking away, said the following:  “Yes, there were some dragons around back in the day - and there still are. But not nearly so many as people in the other lands think. And even the ones we do have here are quite different from what everyone thinks. There are many reasons for this but mainly it is because they are our neighbours and friends, members of our community and some of them are even our family members.

“But the reputation of the fierce dragons is helpful for us who live here and useful for those who live outside. It helps keep people away who really don’t want to be a part of our lives. It gives them an excuse to avoid coming here and a reason to fear us and so in this way they can stay safe and warm and happy in their own homes far away and never have to do something they really never wanted to do in the first place - get to know us.

“It keeps strangers out of our community and scares them away so they don’t come down and bother us, because we know that if they did come into our land, they would look down their noses at us because they think they are better than us and they would want to tear things down and build new things and make some of us leave and take others of us away. We are really a small land, not nearly as powerful as the lands surrounding us and we feel the unsettling truth of this in our hearts every day.

“So we pretend that we have these fearsome dragons roaming around our land and the people outside believe that we have these fearsome dragons roaming around our land, and in this way everything stays as it always has and nothing ever has to change and that suits both of us, even if it is just a lie.

“And if the price we pay is that occasionally one of the few real, living dragons who do actually live here decides to eat one of us, well, it seems a small price for us to pay in the bigger scheme of things.

“And even when that does happen, it is hard for us to become too angry or stay too angry at the dragons for eating one of us because, you see, we know the dragons really, really well and we remember when they were young and nothing more than cute little lizards and know that deep down inside, they still are like this.

“It’s just that sometimes when they think dragonish thoughts, then they start to do dragonish things. And it is those things only that the people in the other lands hear about the dragons so they understand them to be this way all the time. They never, ever saw them when they were young and nothing more than cute little lizards and can only see them as scary, fire-breathing dragons. That’s the “truth” that’s most useful to all of us.”

Well, the newcomers didn’t hardly know what to do with this revelation. It seemed to them that everybody had been lying all along - the people who lived in the dragon land and the people who lived outside of it in other lands. And these lies were all fed and kept alive by fear. And even though both groups of people seemed content enough - how happy could they really be when their lives were shaped by fear and lies?

So the small group of people who had ignored the fear everyone said they should feel and moved into the land (who by now had become to a larger group as more people moved into join them and people who had always lived in the land started hanging out with them more and more until they resembled nothing more than one big family) decided that the very best thing that could happen was for everyone - both the people in the land and the people outside in other lands - to simply stop being afraid and stop lying to themselves and others. Because they knew that power of a lie is in its fear and that if you stop being afraid then the lie just fades away and dies. And the best way to take away this power was to start living different sort of lives, lives that no longer hid behind lies and fear, lives that opened up more than they closed off, lives that were free.

So they all started talking more and more about this and spending more and more time together in order to talk about this and it seemed like a new family had taken root in the land - a family that was growing and growing. And the more they talked, the more excited everyone became and the more other people saw this and the more they wanted to join in the conversation and feel like they were part of the family. And slowly but surely the words, “What if…” were spoken more and more in their conversations and eventually they altogether replaced the old thoughts of “What is will always be”, and “What had always been will never change.”

They organized get-togethers that included music and laughter and food. And they cried together and held each other. They started rebuilding the places the dragons has knocked down and restoring the relationships that had been cramped by fear and lies. And some of them taught all the others the truth of who they really were and all of them listened to the truth of who everyone else really was and the more truth they spoke and listened to, the lighter the whole land became - the shadows started to shrink away and become nothing more than smudges and people started to venture out at night (most particularly those who had never gone out at night because they had always believed that this was when the dragons came out).

Some of them ventured out of their land to visit the other surrounding lands and discovered that they had relatives they never even knew existed there. A few people from the other lands even came to visit (not too many and not to move in and live there…just to visit).

But the most amazing wonder of all was that some dragons crept out of their lairs, quietly and warily, not breathing any fire or with even a whiff of smoke and no roaring whatsoever and lay down on the ground a little way off from the loud, happy, laughing, courageous family and watched them, with their heads resting on their front paws and their tails slowly switching from side to side and some people who noticed them swore that the occasional smile lit up their faces and that one or two even snorted as if they were trying to laugh (a difficult thing for a dragon to do, after all).

And the land that everyone used to think of as a place full of dragons, became known instead as the land of light and love and laughter.

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)

Writer: Major Geoff Ryan is co-founder of theRubicon and was publisher for three years. He is co-ordinator of the 614 Network and organizes the bi-annual Urban Forum. His interests include writing, politics, coffee and his children. Geoff and his wife Sandra minister in Regent Park, a social housing project in downtown Toronto, Canada.

8 Comments to The Land of Dragons (Geoff Ryan)

1. I want to live there….
Adam Couchman on May 6th, 2010

2. beautiful. thanks.

   DS
Danielle Strickland on May 6th, 2010

3. Thanks Geoff. Wise, noting that dragons and laughter are somewhat incompatible! ‘Casting’ in parables is always fun. Does the column infer that the odd person gobbled up as dragonfood is of no real consequence to the community (the necessary corporate evil of an acceptable casualty rate, or friendly fire?), or is it a nod to the realpolitik of Paul and Silas/Paul and Barnabas? Or am I being too literal? I thank God for stories, and I thank God for yours.

   Barry
Barry Gittins on May 6th, 2010

4. Barry,

   What I was trying to get at in mentioning that the odd person gets gobbled up by a dragon is that the dragons that do exist in such neighbourhoods are a part of the community, but also pose a threat to it. The young gang members in our neighbourhood grew up here and are related to many stable members of the community, yet they do what they do, often resulting in negative consequences, even at times fatal, for the whole community.

   Thanks for your comments, Barry. You too Adam and Danielle.

   Geoff
Geoff Ryan on May 6th, 2010

5. Great Stuff, Geoff. Thanks!
Joe Noland on May 7th, 2010

6. Of course, pretending that “gang members” or “drug dealers” or whatever other group are not real people, somebody’s childdren, etc. and just evil agents is a distortion convenient for story-telling.

   It would also be a distortion not to realize how the communities that face more violence than most are quite damanged and traumatized by that violence.

   And that changes in community are dramatic. For 41 years Newark, NJ didn’t have a single calendar month without a murder, and was averaging one murder every 3 days for over 20 years. There were no “bad neighborhoods” on the stats sheets, it was all the neighborhoods. And the people who got killed and the people who did the killing and the people who did both were all infants once. And you can believe that people who live in communities like this look at the world a bit differently than people who live in communities where nobody remembers a murder.

   Our true stories never contain the whole truth.

   Maureen
Maureen on May 7th, 2010

7. Thanks mate - I recognise that parable.

   Andrew
Loves foolosopher on May 7th, 2010

8. Point taken Maureen. I wasn’t trying to soft sell the violence that plagues such communities - either on the part of the purveyors of violence or its victims. The lines are blurred though, in a sense the communities are their own worse enemies, both causing their own pain and suffering from it.

   Geoff
Geoff Ryan on May 12th, 2010

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